


I Will Follow You Shortly

by stellacadente



Series: Dreams of Empire [4]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: The Old Republic
Genre: F/M, Far Future, non-KotFE AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-15
Updated: 2016-03-15
Packaged: 2018-05-26 23:33:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6260449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stellacadente/pseuds/stellacadente
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just some fluffy thoughts about how Malavai Quinn and my female Sith Warrior Xhareen live out their lives. Minor spoilers for the Sith Warrior class story and romance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Will Follow You Shortly

**Author's Note:**

> Post-KotFE AU, but perhaps adaptable to canon once the Fallen Empire finally falls. Samheen is the eldest daughter of Xhareen Nah-garesh and Malavai Quinn, born as soon as biologically possible after KotFE. I have to keep a Big Headcanon Thing secret (it will be explored in The Spaces In Between at length), the reason why they split up after Corellia, but that shouldn’t spoil the message at all.

_From the journals of beloved author and holovid director Samheen Nah-garesh Quinn in her 68th year_

 

My father lived to be 117 years old. Not unheard of, although surprising for a veteran of two wars and countless Sith political battles. It was his kidneys that finally betrayed him, and he died asleep in his medical bed, my mother sitting by his side. “He’s gone on, Sami,” she said to me. “We have to make preparations now.” And she got up and started doing just that. 

Father left military service earlier than he’d planned, and once the galaxy was secure again from Vitiate/Valkorion’s interference, he took up civilian life with what came closest to exuberance for him. He and Mother had been among those who worked hardest to end the Occupation, and then to secure the treaties that setup the Regnum and Republic Alliance. 

“I wanted to retire as a military man, Samheen, but that was no longer an option. My role in battle was done. Serving your mother, and the Sith, and the Empire directly was clearly my calling.”

“It’s called the Regnum now, Father.” I reminded him of this on many occasions. 

“I am aware,” he would always say, not even looking up from whatever datapad or flimsi he was reading. It was one of our many rituals.

My mother Xhareen died six days after he did. She went to bed that night and did not wake up the next morning. She did not seem to mourn at all during his memorial service – so sparsely attended by non-immediate family, I felt cheated. True, most of their friends and companions had also passed on already; nor was it considered a state funeral. 

When she saw my reddened eyes, she hugged me and said she and Father would be together again soon enough and she was not going to mourn him at all. They’d been separated before, and muddled through, she assured me. This would be child’s play compared to the Occupation. Then she smiled. 

Just what she knew at that moment about her own passing, I cannot say. The night before, she’d gathered all who were still around after the services for a huge meal, and drinks afterward, and we listened to her voice, roughly ground by the years but still deep and musical. She told story after story after story about her life and her life with Father. We all knew these stories. Most of the galaxy did, since I had so shamelessly turned them into holo-novels once I realized no one in the post-Empire days really wanted to face them as facts. My parents were heroes, but they were also lovers and parents and citizens of an uncertain time. Built-in drama, my editor said. I barely needed to take liberties with the source material. 

She had long since accepted my youngest brother’s untimely death, and so offered several funny stories about him as a child, this agent of chaos in a house my Father tried so hard to keep well-ordered. Still, her favorite story was of a young adult Donovar, a relative unknown and unemployed holo-actor at the time. He tried so hard to keep hidden his relationship to me, the novelist, and my parents, the heroic relics. And how he got turned down to play what was essentially a role based on his own father because, as the director stated, “You look nothing like this hero as I envision him, nor do I think you could even begin to understand him.”

She laughed on and on over tales about her companions. About Broonmark, whom I will always remember as my first friend. About Aunt Jaesa, my first instructor, who passed into the Force just last year. Vette, a more distant memory but most beloved by both of my parents. She would always visit with gifts from faraway places. About Aunt Myroli/Darth Nox, my master and my entry into the world of Sith politics. Stories about my brother, Darvas, and how he kept dossiers about everyone in the family as a young boy.

“Still do, Mum,” he said. He’d grown much more jovial in retirement from the Intelligence service, much like our father had once he was able to be convinced to stop working. So we all laughed and pretended it was a joke. Another of our rituals.

But it was after a request by my son, Malavai like his grandfather, that she turned more thoughtful and quiet. “Nana, when was it you knew you were in love with Papa?”

We all knew the story well. I’d used it in a frivolous comedy script I’d written completely separately from their heroic, galaxy-spanning adventures. Donovar, some years into his career now, finally got to play the role of his father in an operatic version of the story, although neither he nor I ever said that’s who it was based on. 

They’d landed on Alderaan, the first visit for both of them. I will let her tell the story now: 

“It’s hard to remember a time that I knew him and didn’t love him. But it was most certainly the first time we rode on a thranta. It was so thrilling. This beast, its heart beating beneath us. And Quinn, so close behind me, not pulling away as he usually did. When it took off and ascended, it was exhilarating and terrifying. I didn’t know whether I was going to fall hundreds of feet to my death, or sprout wings and fly beside it. 

“And once we’d ascended, he leaned in even closer, and said the most romantic thing to me. He said, ‘Look, my lord. Over there is the northern reach of the Alsakan range. It’s more than 15,000 meters tall. Some 400 years ago, an epic avalanche leveled six towns at the base …’ 

“And on he went. And that was the moment. That I fell in love and knew it. Because here we were, having this transcendent experience, together, and I realized that he had looked up and memorized all these facts in advance to share with me. That here we were, away from all the fighting and death and military regulations and Baras’s machinations, and he was still Malavai Quinn. Everyone picked on him. ‘Too rigid, too smart, such a workaholic. And what is up with him and the Imperial Census?’ But the thought of him, leaning in close even though we had headsets on, to share the marvels of this gorgeous world with me, that’s when I knew."

But unlike other times she had told the story, she seemed to feel the need that night to explain one last thing. 

“He gave me the best he had, every moment, even when he failed me. And he made up for those failings with unflagging effort, and always became a better man afterward. It was so hard to stay mad at him. Even when I thought I should. He was the best the old Empire had to offer. Not perfect, just the best.”

What I’d never told anyone, and I’m not sure why even to this day I’ve never shared it, is that my Father once told me the first time he knew he loved my mother was the very moment they debarked from that thranta. The only time he ever relayed this. She was grinning like a school girl, so excited. She thanked him and it was all he could do – my father, the man of infinite self-control – not to sweep her into his arms and kiss her at that moment.

If asked by anyone else, he would insist that their first actual kiss, an awkward encounter when he’d tried and failed to be excused from her service, was when he first realized it. Or shortly thereafter. Or after they’d become intimate. His public story changed, depending on the telling, but I never corrected him nor sought my mother’s opinion on his various versions. I wondered whether the time he told me about the thranta ride was the first time he’d realized it himself. 

After she’d finished the thranta story, Mother begged exhaustion and urged us to stay up and enjoy ourselves. But even at her advanced age, it was always my mother who kept the room lit, and finding it suddenly darker, we all soon enough filed away to our assigned rooms in their vast estate home. 

~~~

It’s now a week after my mother left us. The house is too quiet. My wife, Kamina, has gone back to our home to prepare it for sale. We will be moving in here for good. The children and cousins and Darvas have all left. So I am finally able to begin the task of going through their things. This estate is now mine, and I am determined to preserve as much of their memory as possible, even if I have to set up a wing of the house as a museum of its own and curate it myself. 

But one thing I will not share. One thing I will keep by my bedside until that day that I do not wake up. 

Among my mother’s things, I found a small, motorized model thranta. I’d never seen it before; it was not some abandoned toy from our youth. I tried, but it would no longer work. I opened a panel along the bottom where the controls would be, to find a data spike inside. This worked perfectly when inserted into a control board, and my mother had, apparently rather recently, recorded a voice message to me:

“I always knew your father fell in love the same time I did. But I never said anything, because clearly it was his gift to you. You always wanted to be powerful, even after you left the Regnum to write your stories. And yet, it wasn’t until I saw you with Kamina that I knew you would now understand the real power in the galaxy. 

I will always be proud of you, daughter. You were your father’s and my hardest-won victory. I know you know about your father’s betrayal, and about our separation after Corellia and why, and about our reunion on Korriban despite it all. I was never bothered that you divorced what’s his name, that you couldn’t make your first marriage work. You gave us two delightful grandchildren. You were a better mother than you ever gave yourself credit for. 

Now that we are gone, you will have more credits than you know what to do with. You know the power of the Force. You have your own legacy, and that of my grandchildren and their children, to keep your foothold in the memory of galaxy. Those things I hope give you some comfort. 

But the only story I want you to remember, the only wish I have for you is this: I hope what your father and I gave you was to know the power of love.”

~~~~~

I shut down the computer.

Maybe I should contact my publisher. Maybe it’s time I updated some of my stories. I am nearly 70 years old, and maybe I have finally figured out my own life, and maybe everything else, too.


End file.
